Grounded
by oppex
Summary: AU Ninth Doctor fic. The TARDIS was destroyed along with Gallifrey and the Doctor faces his guilt instead of running from it. This will become a crossover fic later on and will be moved to the Crossover category at that time.
1. Chapter 1

**A.D. 5072**

"The defendant will stand," intoned the judge. It had been a very short trial; that had been helped along by the defendant's humble guilty plea.

"Agent 2034, current alias Jack Harkness," the judge continued once the accused had complied in standing, ignoring his wince at the court's continued refusal to give back to him his true name, "you have been charged with one count of Timeline Displacement. One count of Aggression with Intent to Kill against a fellow agent. One count of Unauthorized Use of Agency Property. One count of Attempted Genocide."

Jack, from his position in front of the judge's seat, bowed his head. He had royally screwed up, that much he was willing to admit to himself.

"Your plea to all of these counts was that of guilty. Your acceptance of responsibility and apparent remorse at your acts has been taken into consideration and the board has handed down your punishment. Effective now you may consider yourself demoted in rank to private. Furthermore, you have been sentenced to fifteen years remedial service in the Alpha Sector. Reassignment to your new sector will occur at 0800 hours tomorrow. Do you understand?"

"Yes, your honor."

"Then this session is dismissed. Next!"

Jack sighed as he was led out of the courtroom and to the cell he would be spending the night in once again. He knew he was lucky that they hadn't just led him out back and shot him—or worse, taken the rest of his memories—but that didn't mean he had to like where he was going. He knew the score. It would be a penal colony or worse, and to add insult to injury he was going to be stuck under the Time Agency's thumb for a long, long time.

Captain Jack Harkness—no, make that _Private_ Jack Harkness—figured he was in for a long stretch of very bad days.

xxxxxxxx

Private Reese Lonson, on the other hand, was living a stretch of mostly mediocre days. The modifier "mostly" was, of course, due solely to the existence of his superior officer.

"Beats!"

His superior officer who _refused to get his name right_.

"_Beats_! Get up here, you worthless ape!"

"I'm _comin'_!" he snapped at the hologram emerging from his wristcomm, and continued to grumble under his breath after he cut the connection as he hopped onto the nearest junk lift and held on tight, balancing on one foot as it started to rise. "Damn Time Lords and their damn superiority complexes—one of these days I'll show _him_ who's an ape…"

Five minutes later, Beats stepped off of the still-ascending junk lift and into the heart of their operation, the Doctor's workshop.

The Doctor, to Beats' annoyance, was too absorbed in something on one of his many vidscreens to acknowledge him immediately. That meant that he had to deal with—

"HELLO BEATS."

-Epsilon. "Eps. Why don't you tell your pops that if he's gonna call me all the way up here he oughta at least gimme the time of day when I get here."

The Doctor brought his fist down on his input board, effectively cutting off whatever he had been looking at as he stalked around the central control panel.

"I am _not_ his pops, his dad, or his father. Say it again and I'm throwing you off the rig," he snapped. His once-gray jumpsuit was smudged and stained to an unpleasant brown color that clashed with his pale complexion and quarter-inch of black hair; fortunately, his fashion errors went unnoticed as Beats' jumpsuit was in precisely the same shape.

"I didn't say nothin'. Maybe you should get those giant ears o' yours checked, yeah?"

"Yeah, I get it. You don't wanna take this field trip to civilization I'm about to offer you. Duly noted—"

"Woah! Woah, Doc. Come on. Who brought you the old-Earth bicycle pump yesterday, huh? That was me. That shit is rare. You gushed over it. I'm good for a trip to the real world, you know I'm just kiddin' around with ya."

The Doctor scowled, but they both knew he was going to give in. "Right. We're finally gettin' a replacement for what's-his-name. You're gonna pick him up at headquarters in the mornin' and bring him straight here. _Straight_ here, understand?"

Beats grimaced. It was depressing, the way the Doctor acted like he had forgotten the agents who worked with them before. Beats had been around long enough for four partners to come and go; he had five years of experience working with the Doctor, but he had no doubt that he wouldn't last a day in the alien's memory once he was gone. The first agent he had worked with here in the junkyard, after all, had been there for ten years before Beats showed up and the Doctor hadn't given _him_ any regard after he was reassigned.

But a trip to the outside was a trip to the outside, and Beats wasn't inclined to turn it down.

"You got it, boss. Should I bring back souvenirs? Something for Kid Tentacles over here?"

"I AM NOT A CHI-ILD," Epsilon protested haughtily. "I WOULD LIKE A NEW COOL-ING PAD."

"I don't care what you do as long as it's done with before you pick up the new meat," the Doctor said dismissively. "Now get back to work."

"I'm goin', I'm goin'. Sheesh."

Epsilon remained perched on his rail—it was just a series of pipes welded together by the Doctor years previously to give him access to all of the workshop, but it served its purpose—until Beats started his descent back to the ground level. Once the rowdy Time Agent had disappeared below them he shimmied along the rail to the edge of the Doctor's input board, where he hopefully extended a single gray tentacle.

The Doctor grudgingly held out his arm, and Epsilon happily transferred himself from the rail to the Doctor's upper arm.

"WE WILL HAVE A NEW HU-MAN?" he asked, voice rising into a hopeful tone at the end.

"Yeah, another ape. 'S boring if you ask me."

"IT WILL HAVE A COOL-ING PAD?"

"Before long, I expect."

"I LIKE HU-MANS WITH COOL-ING PADS."

"I know," the Doctor said dryly. "You love bein' spoiled."

He indulged Epsilon with a little rub behind his head mass, then held out his arm so the smaller alien could go back to his rail.

"Now it's back to work. Finish your coding and I'll let you go ground level to meet your new human tomorrow," he instructed, then turned back to his display.

It was good timing, he thought. His time itch had been especially fierce lately, so it stood to reason that a person whose personal timeline could scratch it was coming his way.

He might not be able to travel anymore, but time and space had a way of bending to bring its problems to him.

xxxxxx

Whatever Jack had been expecting his escort to be like, it certainly wasn't anything like the man grinning like an idiot in front of his cell. Tall, bald, and covered in grime, he looked more like a ship mechanic than a time agent. He even had white lines around his eyes, the only clue to his actual skin color that could no doubt be attributed to the equally grimy goggles that were currently resting around his neck.

"Howdy," the man said through his grin, ignoring the looks of obvious distaste Jack's guards were giving him. "I'm your new partner."

Jack let his eyes drift to the man's wrist. He was wearing a standard-issue wristcomm.

"Hope you're ready, buddy, 'cause we're late for an appointment in hell and the Doctor's gonna be _pissed_."

The guards opened the door to his cell. Jack stepped forward. Beats gripped his arm and tapped his wristcomm—and they were off.


	2. Chapter 2

The first thing that hit Jack, even before he opened his eyes after the teleport, was the heat.

The air was so thick with it that he found himself choking, and that sensation was only slightly relieved by Beats pushing a portable air filter over his face.

"You'll get used to it!" Beats announced cheerfully as Jack attempted to catch his breath. He had pushed his goggles back over his eyes and for a moment, through the heat haze, Jack was uncomfortably reminded of the mess he had made on Earth.

But he knew he couldn't spend forever dwelling on the past, even if it was still weighing heavily on his mind, so Jack let his training take over. First rule in a new area: survey your surroundings. He was standing at the bottom of what seemed to be a huge landfill. Heaps of trash the size of moderately-sized space cruisers were scattered across the landscape in semi-orderly patterns, and huge lifts deposited pallets of trash and lifted new ones. The air had an orange glow to it and there wasn't a sky or ceiling that Jack could see; it was like he was standing in a coliseum that stretched upward into infinity.

He _could_ just make out an unmoving dark spot in the redness above him, but it was hard to tell from his position on the ground what it was.

He intended to demand of his "partner" where exactly they were, but he was beaten to the punch.

"Welcome to the Junkyard. The end of the line for ex-cons like you and me," Beats said, waving one arm to encompass the entire operation. "The name's Private Lonson, but you can call me Beats. No point in fightin' what the old man started!"

His introduction only left Jack with a hundred more questions and a sour expression on his face. He hadn't been well briefed (or briefed at all, for that matter) on his reassignment and it was starting to wear on his nerves. But he wasn't going to get a chance to ask anytime soon.

"HELLO," said a voice from the ground. Jack followed the voice with his eyes, then immediately took a step back as he saw the source of it, a gently pulsating gray blob on the ground.

"What the hell is that?" he demanded of Beats.

"I AM EPSILON, LAST OF THE DALEKS," Epsilon said before Beats could get a word in. "YOU MAY NOT CALL ME EPSILON BE-CAUSE I DO NOT LIKE YOU."

"Let the Doctor hear you talking like that and he'll throw you in the pit," Beats said with an unpleasant laugh. He turned a conspiratorial grin onto Jack. "The boss hates bein' reminded that Eps here is a Dalek. Bad associations, you know."

"I DO NOT LIKE BE-ING ON THE GROUND," Epsilon interjected. Beats huffed at him in reply.

"Get up here, then, you big baby."

Jack watched in faint horror as Epsilon climbed up Beats' leg to rest on the torso section of his jumpsuit, where a piece of unmatched fabric jutted out.

"It's a cooling pad," Beats said in answer to Jack's unasked question. "This little bugger's used to the Doctor's body temperature and it runs a lot cooler than ours." Any further discussion on that was interrupted by the arrival of a junk lift, one of the many that Jack had been observing just minutes before.

"Hey, here's our ride. Hop on and I'll give you a little briefing. You'll need it if you don't wanna be swimming in stupidity when the Doctor gets a hold of ya!"

Beats swung himself onto the pallet and took hold of one of the lift cables holding it in place, Epsilon still clinging to his midsection.

"Don't take all day!" he cautioned Jack, and the newly demoted agent just managed to get a foothold and grab a cable of his own before the lift started its long ascent. Jack found himself feeling impressed despite himself as they slowly gained height until the ground was hundreds of yards below them.

He also found himself appreciating the rush that came with standing with one foot dangling over the edge of a deep chasm that was only getting deeper. He could get used to this—it was his kind of feeling. If he was going to be stuck here for fifteen years, he might as well learn to enjoy it. But that didn't mean he had to take grief from his new partner, or his new commanding officer, or from the last freaking Dalek in the universe.

"You've got one hell of a welcome party," he said, not bothering to hide the annoyance in his voice. "Got any other highly dangerous alien species hanging around?"

Epsilon's indignant huff was drowned out by Beats' half-derisive laugh.

"We've got the most dangerous of'em all," he said smugly. "A Time Lord."

xxxxx

The Doctor tapped impatiently at the console. The boys were on their way up on a lift, which meant he had very little time to process Private Jack Harkness's presence—and he was beginning to realize he was going to need more than a few minutes to work through the man's personal timeline. There were so many events that could have been, or should have been, or should _be_ but were now changing that just thinking about it was giving him a headache.

He dodged around the console, tweaking a lever here and pumping a handle there. The universe was bending to bring him its problems, all right, and Jack Harkness was going to be a gigantic mess if the time threads surrounding him were any indication.

xxxxx

"I'm sure you've heard the legends," Beats said to Jack's disbelieving expression. "They're mostly true, if the Doctor's to be believed. That's what this place is all about. There was a war, and no matter who won the rest of the universe was gonna get screwed, so the Doctor ended it by killing everybody involved. Time Lords, Daleks, the whole lot. The Shadow Proclamation awarded him medals and gave him a thousand years of hard time in the same trial. And you thought you had it tough!"

Jack didn't think Beats' laughter at that was very funny.

"You're saying our _commanding officer_ committed double genocide?"

"Welcome to the Junkyard!" Beats repeated in response. "Home of the universe's most lovable genocidal freaks. They told the Doctor he could serve his time through community service, so he built this place. Alpha Sector's finest junk heap. The Agency liked the idea so much that they built twenty more in other sectors. This one, though, it's the Doctor's baby. They even let him pick which crazy-ass cons get to work here, and he picked you. Never thought you'd be able to say you had this much in common with a Time Lord, right?"

"I didn't _commit_ genocide!" Jack snapped. "It was an accident and it didn't take in the end-"

"Which is why you're only servin' fifteen," interrupted an equally irritable voice. "Figures you apes would be thick enough that I gotta spell it out for you."

"All ashore that's goin' ashore," Beats announced. "We're here. Welcome to—"

"Cut the tour speech," the Doctor advised, glaring at both agents as they hopped from the still-ascending lift to the floor of the Workshop. "This is my workshop, Harkness. Keep your hands to yourself and don't touch anything that ain't yours."

He stepped into Jack's personal space, backing Jack up without shame until he was nearly hanging over the edge of the workshop, and sniffed at him suspiciously.

"Fifty-first century, huh. This one's gonna be a load of trouble, I can feel it."

"Hey!" Jack protested in return, hackles raised. "You don't know anything about me—"

"I know plenty. Definitely enough to know that I'm gonna be keeping a close eye on you."

The Doctor turned his attention to Beats. "Show him his quarters and get him started on the floor. You've got more than enough work down there to keep you busy."

It was obvious from Jack's body language that he wanted to argue with the Doctor and his brusque tone, but Beats put a heavy hand on his arm and started to guide him away as Epsilon finally released him to climb onto his rail.

Once they had disappeared into the depths of the Workshop, Epsilon felt confident in giving his opinion.

"I DO NOT LIKE HIM," he announced. The Doctor snorted.

"That makes two of us. Next time I'll go for an ape that isn't so damn young."

"CHILD-REN," Epsilon said with a suffering air, and completely missed the Doctor rolling his eyes.

It was beginning to look like Jack Harkness was going to have difficult days ahead.


End file.
